Haroldo Conte Museum, Buenos Aires, 2013

In Culture and Imperialism Edward Said notes that during the 1970s and 1980s an important ideological shift occurs where French radical intellectuals express a lack of faith in the grand narratives of emancipation ‘narrative, which posits an enabling beginning point and a vindicating goal, is no longer adequate … we are stuck within our circle’. (29)

Continental philosophy turns to the postmodern subject. In politics authoritarian regimes gain favour with Reaganism and Thatcherism. Britain and Argentina are at war for 72 days over the Falklands Islands: a remote territory British people did not know existed. The historical subject undergoes a moment of a temporary loss of perspective.

Three works in the exhibition are generated by my encounter with three found objects connected with the Falklands/Malvinas and to a context associated with tourism and leisure.

STRANGE NOSTALGIAS is a photographic installation featuring views of Portsmouth harbour shot from the periscope of the HMS Conqueror, the nuclear submarine that sunk the ASA Belgrano under critical circumstances.  The periscope is installed at the museum for the public to view the harbour: conceptualised as a gaze, the submarine’s eye operates as a reverse panopticon with a fixed 360 degree perspective onto the homeland.  The work was initially conceived as a series of postcards.

REMOTE POSSIBILITIES is a three-image single channel projection performing an ‘adaptation’ of a tourist magazine feature published in 2011 promoting the Falklands Islands. Re-enacted by an actor in an 1863 London theatre this video essay deconstructs the original text and re-structures it in three chapters: poetics, history, wildlife.

THE LINDA ARCHIVE features ten photo-textual-sound items presented in a sequence and correspond to a poetic socio-historical response to the introductory text of Linda Kitson, the female artist deployed to the Falklands to draw the war in 1982.  A pseudo-forensic approach to the text generates an eclectic archive that combines anthropological and historical research, correspondance exchanged with institutions or individuals, photography, philosophy and drawing